Introduction
Kingdoms rise and fall, gods are born and destroyed, the world after looks different from the world before, but…
…the players still have no agency.Footnote 1
On 6 January 2021, over two thousand rioters entered the US Capitol Building, screened live on rolling news coverage and captured on social media. The immediate context was the defeat of US President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, with a joint session of Congress sat to count Electoral College votes, formalising the victory of President-Elect Joseph Biden. Outside, thousands gathered in opposition to the election’s result and ratification.Footnote 2 The immediate impacts of forcing entry to the Capitol Building included: the looting and vandalising of the premises, at a cost of over 2.7 million US dollars; five associated deaths (as well as four subsequent police suicides); and over one hundred police injuries. The event was exceptionally televisual, with the spectacular sight of rioters in congressional offices and the Senate chamber accompanied by first hand reports on social media, from both perpetrators and fearful politicians, now sheltering in the building with relatively limited law enforcement protection. Despite being over in a few hours, with Biden’s victory belatedly confirmed, the longer-term implications were highly significant. Most immediately consequential for domestic US politics was Trump’s subsequent impeachment and a resulting series of legal challenges, which conditioned his basis for re-election in 2024. This extended to the question of his continued dominance of the Republican party, considering its leader’s apparent challenge to the most fundamental institutions and practices of American democracy – the peaceful transfer of power, following free and fair public elections.Footnote 3 In this reading, January 6th posed an existential threat to the United States as the land of the free.Footnote 4
Considering their apparent gravity – the real and potential consequences of the dayFootnote 5 – that the Capitol riots of January 6th constituted a significant event may seem common sense. Yet, many Republican politicians have offered alternative readings, even amongst those shown to have barricaded doors to hold the apparent threat at bay. Andrew Clyde,Footnote 6 for example, has described the situation as resembling a ‘normal tourist visit’, in stark contrast to other framings of the day, depicting a planned insurrection, violent uprising, and attempted coup. It is this divergence in readings of the fundamental ‘event-ness’ of the Capitol riots that catalyses the article’s focus. Does January 6th constitute a moment of rupture and change or confirmation and continuity; how does this differ between partisan political and media elites; and what does this mean for how we understand the interaction of narratives and events in US political debate? We explore the framings of the day’s events in national political debate, assessing whether key constructivist (and narrative) IR theory is equipped to make sense of that response by drawing out the implications of sustained discursive divergence amidst the hyper-polarised and highly fractured context of contemporary US politics.
Specifically, we assess Ron Krebs’sFootnote 7 research on narratives of national security, supplementing his theoretical framework to meet the demands of a ‘new’ fractured era of hyper-polarisation, in which an external enemy has been replaced by the domestic referent objects of symbiotic, inward-facing national security narratives, articulated by myriad storying agents.Footnote 8 As geopolitical narratives have diverged – on Russia, China, and Iran, for example – unification has increasingly occurred through internal distinctions, as domestic politics becomes an issue of national security. In the current era, we show that two inward-looking national security narratives compete, co-constituting and sustaining one another, preventing the emergence of a shared dominant national narrative, storying America’s place in the world and security politics at home. That this situation is sustained raises questions for Krebs’s (and constructivism’s) observation that eras with single dominant national security narratives tend to be empirically enduring. By extension, it also poses questions for constructivist theory and temporality.
To further constructivist analysis, we bring Krebs’s framework into dialogue with an interdisciplinary ‘eventful sociology’ literature.Footnote 9 We seek to supplement Krebs’s structural explanations (around ‘fit’) with a greater focus upon contingency and agentic creativity, moving constructivism towards the temporality of a more configurational eventful sociology. First, drawing on Sewell, we make the case for a contingent, agentic, and configurational supplement to more structural variants of constructivist theory. Second, drawing on van Dooremalen’s typology, we explore competing constructions of ‘events’, as either confirmatory or transformative.Footnote 10 In the case of the Capitol riots, we show how both constructions were initially evident and important but ultimately gave way to the political impulse to continuity derived from myriad but polarised contextual demands, as Republicans bowed to Trump’s hold over the Republican party and Democrats sought to unite a divided country, creating a firmer platform on which to govern. We show that an ensemble of agentic narrative choices – the heart of a contextual and contingent eventful sociology temporality – are a necessary supplement to (more structural) constructivist theories of change, events, and narrative.
Surprisingly, then, our analysis reveals how the Capitol riots were storied as confirmatory for and within two distinct narratives of US national security. Analysing a dataset of 1288 texts – coded for emotions, sentiments, and themes (see appendix) – from Republican and Democrat politicians as well as across US news media (print and television), we elucidate the active struggle to construct and narrate the Capitol riots, setting the dominant interpretive discourse for US politics. In so doing, we reveal the discursive mechanisms – such as silence, normalisation, disaggregation, and delegitimisation – employed to construct these alternate representational realities. Our analysis reveals the differences in coverage between and within liberal and conservative communities (political and media elites), as well as the convergence of both around a construction of continuity, foregrounding the creative agency of a variety of actors beyond structural narrative impulses. Despite the riots constituting a potentially shocking event, providing opportunity to establish a new dominant narrative, both parties – through contingent and creative agentic ensembles – failed or declined to deploy the necessary linguistic techniques to capitalise on this opportunity. Surprisingly, we show how this included Democrats and the liberal media, who adopted an argumentation mode to place the riots within their extant national security narrative, rather than constructing a rupturing event. Our argument is that this cannot be understood as ‘merely’ a strategic response to an endogenous shock but rather requires an understanding of the multiple, often nuanced, agentic choices taken within the divided – and fragmented – landscape of US politics.
The article therefore sequentially develops three contributions to international relations, centred on contemporary empirics, allied to an interdisciplinary theoretical supplementation of constructivism, and a vital new case study. First, we show how the sustained affective polarisation and fragmentation of the contemporary era – co-constitutive of symbiotic national security narratives – runs counter to the principal empirical observation (and attendant theoretical assumptions) of Krebs’s and constructivist research. Despite the explanatory power of constructivism generally and Krebs’s framework specifically, domestic US politics has rapidly evolved to challenge both. Second, we suggest how IR theory might better account for the sustained coexistence of multiple, competing, and mutually reinforcing national security narratives. To do so, we further the insights of a narrative constructivism by extending our analysis through engagement with eventful sociology. This enables us to evidence the heightened importance of multiple storytelling agents, whose efforts combine to construct and narrate key political events, in contrast to more structural explanations of elite – and usually presidential – instrumental linguistic adaptation to exogenous shock. Third, mobilising this interdisciplinary understanding of change, events, and narrative, our analysis reveals the evolution of competing constructions of the Capitol riots across the partisan landscape of US politics. We conclude with reflections on the need for theoretical renewal and historical comparison.
Constructivism and dominant discourses
Dominant narratives – from the Cold War to the War on Terror – have often served as the foundation for debates over national security.Footnote 11
Constructivism is a powerful, popular, and diverse approach to the study of world politics and social life. TRIPS survey data reveals that, for some time already, more IR scholars self-identify as constructivist than any other approach.Footnote 12 This pre-eminent popularity has both followed and helped to engender some of IR’s most exciting theoretical developments and empirical analyses. While research foci diverge – covering language, norms, and culture, for example – constructivism’s single uniting mantra might potentially be that ‘ideas matter’: they are productive of political (im)possibilities and, as such, analysing international politics in lieu of the ideational is to develop only a partial account of a complex and constituted reality. Since language is the principal vector through which ideas become intersubjective, words and texts have long been at the heart of constructivist analyses. Where language becomes relatively stable, producing meaning with greater systematicity and predictability, discourses form.Footnote 13 Our focus, here, is on this linguistic variant of constructivism, which tends to inhabit its thicker – or critical – currents of thought, as it sets out to analyse discourse.
While excellent research on contestation exists,Footnote 14 our central contention here is that constructivism has demonstrated a proclivity to analyse dominant discourses. Indeed, the principal aim – and motivating objective – of much constructivist research is the deconstruction of dominant discourses, which are seen to do violence to marginalised voices. This deconstruction might take a quintessentially Derridean form to highlight the role and construction of binary identities at the heart of dominant narratives or an approach akin to a more generalised (Foucauldian) denaturalisation. The importance of understanding dominant discourses, which assumes their existence, significance, and political productivity, is shared by many constructivist researchers. We suggest that there are two roots to this proclivity.
First, the sizeable influence of critical discourse analysis (CDA) on constructivism has generated a tendency to deconstruct dominant discourses.Footnote 15 CDA brings forth a normative imperative to focus on revealing linguistically produced relations of domination. The normative motivation for analysis is to lessen the subjugation of the oppressed by rendering dominant discourses strange – revealing them as cultural, not natural – as a precursor to their subsequent and required resisting. Such discourses might take patriarchal, racial, heteronormative, or class-based forms, for example, but all share the feature of marginalising one group, to their detriment and the benefit of another. CDA’s methodological influence and ethical drive have engendered a preponderance of constructivist research that seeks to challenge and undo the way of things, as they are, in their less-than-resplendent inequality. The consequence of this normative foundation is a focus on dominant discourses over and at the expense of others. In international relations, with a frequent focus on the nation-state, this normative and methodological impulse has tied harmoniously with the empirical reality that political elites often benefit from and actively sustain national mythologies as a shared basis on which to govern. Constructivism has, time and again, shown how security and national identity are co-constituted, such that foreign policy is something the state both does and is. In short, CDA’s normative ambitions – premised upon the theoretical imbrication of language and power – have worked in tandem with IR’s disciplinary impulse to focus on dominant discourses, given its usual object of study.
Second, there exists an enduring and sustained critique of discourse analytic work’s structural bias. Notwithstanding the importance of areas such as ‘strategic narrative’, much of narratology, ontological security theory, and a broad constructivist agenda focuses on the stability (and associated silencing) of dominant, enduring discursive formations. Early constructivist motivations to understand change (such as the end of the Cold War) rapidly gave way to explain the stability of, first, bipolarity and then, second, unipolarity. Such efforts were readily expanded to the deconstruction of the dominant discourses sustaining national identities.Footnote 16 In significant part, this situation arose due to US hegemony, in both world politics and the discipline of IR. But Kinnvall and Mitzen also identify the roots of this ‘tilt’ in IR’s particular use and reading of Giddens’s work, inclusive of a flattening out of agency as it is reincorporated into a structurationist view of the social, which was just as important for constructivism, generally, as ontological security theory, specifically.Footnote 17 An inability to adequately account for agency – the volition of those articulating, adapting, or challenging discourses – has been a recurrent refrain for those critical of such structuralism. Challenge and change – resistance and reimagining – can become lost in an approach set up to reveal the harms of dominant ways of thinking, talking, and doing. Constructivism can, at times, veil contingency – and the possibility of alternative – whether derived from intuitive impulse or instrumental and motivated reasoning. As Spicer and Fleming bluntly put it, ‘discourse studies cannot deal with the active contestation of discourse’.Footnote 18 And, for Newton, ‘the influence of Foucauldian-inspired discourse analytic methods has led to a reduction in the role of agency’.Footnote 19
The irony of the combination of these two tendencies is that the theoretical bias of the latter can underdo – and actively work against – the normative drive of the former.Footnote 20 A structural focus lends itself to a conservative bias, which it is possible to critique as reducing IR’s more critical agendas to the lending of ‘social theoretic foundations’ to a broadly realist worldview, in which strong actors set the narrative terms of debate in their own favour.Footnote 21 Kinnvall and Mitzen highlight this critique of ontological security theory specifically, but given the mutual philosophical anchorage of narrative and constructivist approaches more broadly, its extension is as feasible as it is necessary.Footnote 22 Within this critique, constructivism is reimagined as being about the (preservation of the) status quo (through its continual reproduction and naturalised existence). As Kinnvall and Mitzen note, the ‘ontological security lens [… can] feel weighted toward theorizing a conservative, even realist world’.Footnote 23 Our proposed supplementation of constructivist theory can help to overcome this, better accounting for change and contingent outcomes, by emphasising the role of agentic creativity, with multiple storytellers acting in messy concert, as part of the ensemble of events’ configuration.
Structuralism, narrative, and ‘fit’
Our focus, here, narrows from constructivism generally to Krebs’s framework for the analysis of national security narratives specifically.Footnote 24 Krebs’s monograph, Narrative and the Making of US National Security,Footnote 25 is an important text that bridges between camps.Footnote 26 We focus on this work, primarily, because it stands out as the project that most fully and persuasively explains the rise and fall of dominant narratives.Footnote 27 Drawing on Croft,Footnote 28 Edkins,Footnote 29 and the Copenhagen School,Footnote 30 allied to the interdisciplinary anchorage of Barthes (on narrative), Gramsci (on hegemony), and Foucault (on discourse), Krebs’s aim is to explore how it is that national security narratives become dominant, or ‘how political actors gain discursive dominance’,Footnote 31 going on to shape the common sense of the era. It achieves this through the systematic assessment of linguistic modes in different situations. In this task, it is a powerful, useful, and persuasive extension and application of constructivist theory, which develops a (positivist and quantified) structuralist analysis of change and continuity in US national security. We argue, however, its explanatory potential is constrained by its structuralism, through the notion of agency–narrative ‘fit’.
Krebs’s thesis begins from the empirical observation that is familiar to constructivism more generally: foreign policy is, more often than not, structured by dominant narratives of national security. Furthering CroftFootnote 32 and Jackson,Footnote 33 Krebs aims to develop a framework to explain how, why, and when narratives win out, becoming dominant in moments of temporal rupture, going on to structure subsequent narrative security debates in enduring periods of relative stability. These eras are notable for their coalescing around key maxims – areas of agreement that undergird narrative coherence. What remains of political contestation in these eras is rhetorical and tactical, rather than narrative and strategic. United by a dominant discourse of the War on Terror or Cold War, for example, political opponents are left without sufficient tools to craft a socially sustainable narrative alternative;Footnote 34 they are left to dispute troop numbers and deployment durations, rather than the idea ‘we’ should fight ‘terrorists’ and ‘communist evil’. To contest the latter would require a new, powerful story, which was rendered an impossibility for several decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These eras of American history are testament to the power of dominant narratives.
We argue that this empirical observation has generated theoretical bias towards structuralism and a temporality that envisages a return to agreement as inevitable. This view of history is broadly correlated with ‘punctuated equilibria’, as moments of change are brief (e.g., 9/11), interspersing prolonged periods of continuity (e.g., the War on Terror). It imagines the system as self-rectifying, with crisis events as moments of imbalance that can be remedied through elite-led narrative entrepreneurship. The populace, in their majority, coalesce behind, around, and through the new narrative consensus. Yet, times were not always thus. Krebs’sFootnote 35 book is prudently focused upon the travails of relatively recent national security debates. Continuity, stability, and narrative dominance would, of course, look alien to the national security landscape of Civil War–era America, for instance, just as it looks foreign to post-2016 US politics. Therefore, while a new political context cannot ‘invalidate’ an empirical observation, it does raise questions about the limitations of theory built upon it.
Krebs’s ‘punctuated equilibria’ temporality comprises (enduring) settled and (brief) unsettled narrative situations, which he couples to specific rhetorical modes – ‘argument and storytelling’.Footnote 36 In settled narrative situations, contestation and change are difficult and costly, as a dominant narrative constrains and channels acceptable debate, with coercion ‘depriving others of the materials necessary to produce a counterargument’.Footnote 37 Within this scenario, discussions and policies are only sustainable if they fall within the purview of the settled narrative. This trend tends to favour those in power who can wield the settled narrative situation to their advantage, using it to restrict and limit discussions and dissent. This is, by far, the prevalent order of things, with dominant narratives structuring the long durée of US political debate. In short, this is due to a third factor in Krebs’s framework, which is also seen in the focus of much constructivist research: the power of authority and specifically the president’s bully pulpit.Footnote 38 This emphasis reduces the array of relevant storytelling actors, leaving those at the very top to match – or fail to match – their behaviour to the (exogenous) demands of the day.
Similarly, where Krebs focuses on the possibility of change and contestation, this is short-lived, with the inevitable victory of a single dominant narrative structured into his framework. In moments when actors gain strategic opportunity to shape a narrative’s (re-)production, that strategic opportunity is structurally determined: elite response, appropriate or not – an agency–narrative ‘fit’ – to exogenous shock (a challenge to the dominant narrative). In unsettled narrative situations, elites will either seize or fail to seize the discursive opportunity afforded by ‘events’. This is because, for Krebs and akin to ontological security theory, populations desire settled discursive situations with the predictability offered by dominant narrativesFootnote 39 – ‘people are eager for a rhetoric that would help return them to that ordered state’, and this requires that actors accurately pair their actions to ‘focus their rhetorical efforts on storytelling’.Footnote 40
If Krebs’s first scenario is the long durée of the US national security debate, structured by a single dominant narrative, his second identifies the moments in which those narratives are first written. In both, agency is limited to key storytellers and hollowed out to follow the structural logic of narrative ‘fit’ to the situation; it is a structural theory of change and continuity that writes out more configurational and sociological understandings of history. As such, ‘mismatch’ becomes failure: a non-alignment of events and their storying that could be rectified by elites better recognising and acting upon the demands of the moment. Elites should craft new narratives in response to crisis events, given that more logical alignment of action and context would generate a successful outcome. We do agree with Krebs that ‘contestation is the lifeblood of politics, but it is never unstructured’.Footnote 41 Yet, we suggest, too great a focus on the structural drivers of narrative change, traversing through the bully pulpit of a logical president, can veil a richer array of options for key orators and the configurational concerto of myriad storytelling agents.
Eventful sociology: Narrative(s), ‘events’, and contingency
In moments of political crisis, as sociocultural scaffoldings fail and recede, actors and their interactions come to the forefront.Footnote 42
In unsettled times, actors adjust to their changing context.Footnote 43 The implications of this are very different to Krebs’s ‘fit’ variable, as politicians either correctly pursue narrative innovation or incorrectly stick to a limited rhetorical mode. Rather, for eventful sociology,Footnote 44 events may well engender structural transformations, but they are brought about contingently by multiple, interacting agents.Footnote 45 ‘Structure and event should be conceptualised as strongly related to one another.’Footnote 46 No longer exogenous shock in a structural explanation of change and continuity, events are configured through the iterative, contingent interactions of a range of actors.Footnote 47 Events can change structures and structures are rethought as accumulations of events, foregrounding the agents that act en masse to produce them, imbuing them with meaning that goes beyond a mere happening.Footnote 48 However, while ‘events offer opportunities for swift alterations’,Footnote 49 they remain ‘murky empirical facts’ that do not inexorably drive ‘structural transformation’.Footnote 50 Events are not necessarily crises, leading to new eras, but ‘contingent, unexpected, and inherently unpredictable events…can undo or alter the most apparently durable trends of history’.Footnote 51
An eventful conception of temporality therefore is not necessarily a radical departure from the empirical observation of punctuated equilibria. It is, however, an important supplement – and corrective – to structural explanations of narrative change and continuity.Footnote 52 Path dependencies pair with temporally heterogenous causalities – the standard, ‘implicit intellectual baggage of most academic historians’, rather than those seeking to replicate the natural sciences.Footnote 53 The context of the specific case matters greatly. It is the contingency of ‘countless happenings’ and ‘encounters’ of ‘social action’ that combine to configure events, which are replete with the potential to change social causality and the structures through and by which social life is navigated and lived. What, then, determines whether an event will be left as a mere ‘incident’, reduced to a ‘happening’,Footnote 54 or elevated to a full-blown ‘crisis’?Footnote 55 Answering this question, van Dooremalen – similarly to other researchers of social movementsFootnote 56 – provides a conceptualisation of how some events generate the impact necessary to unsettle stable narrative situations and in so doing rise above the unmemorable status of a mere happening.Footnote 57
Van Dooremalen’s typology differentiates ‘shock events’ from ‘focus events’, distinguished by their impact on the discursive structures that give them meaning.Footnote 58 For van Dooremalen, ‘shock events’ occur when an event causes a schism within an established dominant narrative, challenging its principal structure and/or key tenets. These types of events are correspondingly categorised as ‘unforeseen’ and ‘unpredicted’, having fallen outside of the bounds of the normal storyline, and are thus seen to have potentially long-lasting consequences for society. As ‘a crucial turning point…that dramatically increases or decreases the level of mobilization’,Footnote 59 they can lead a population to ‘suddenly question …previously taken-for-granted certainties…potentially changing not only their conduct of life but their identity’.Footnote 60 It is not objectively obvious when an event will be configured to meet this threshold, as even ‘small and seemingly routine events can be sufficiently disruptive of otherwise stable…routines and habitual ways of thinking’.Footnote 61
In contrast, while still memorable, ‘focus events’ do not unsettle the dominant narrative context; in fact, they help to reconfirm it and reproduce narrative dominance. Focusing events thus attract an unusual amount of attention from the public, but the political response is usually to quieten, rather than amplify, their significance and consequence. Van Dooremalen posits that the changes produced on the back of ‘focus events’ are therefore far less significant and extensive, since they reaffirm the maxims and nodal ties of dominant discursive frameworks. In short, a ‘focus event emerges from confirmation, whereas a shock event is caused by surprise’,Footnote 62 with both transcending the unmemorable status of an everyday occurrence as ‘a significant rejection or…a significant confirmation of the ideas and expectations that comprise existing interpretative structures’.Footnote 63 For Alimi and Maney, both ‘focusing’ and ‘transformative’ events are produced through ‘a dialogical, seesaw-like process in which opposing actors interpret contentious events as either political opportunities or threats for certain purposes, and at specific levels of contentious engagement’.Footnote 64
This constructionist view of events bears parallels with research in politics and IR from the likes of Hay,Footnote 65 Edkins,Footnote 66 Croft,Footnote 67 and Brassett and Vaughan-WilliamsFootnote 68 on the discursive construction of crises as (emotionally and temporally) traumatic, through the ‘decisive interventions’ of political elites to articulate ‘events’ in specific ways. Their very ‘eventful-ness’ – what they mean, how they are experienced and recounted, and what they do – takes shape in their preceding and subsequent narrative context: the event does not and cannot speak for itself. Our contribution speaks to differences within these debates, as Hay’s more structural explanations of crises’ narration contrast Croft’s popular culture focus and the everyday multiplicities of vernacular security approaches.Footnote 69 Brought into dialogue with Krebs’ framework on dominant narratives, an eventful sociology typology sheds light on how multiple actors on both sides of the political aisle make sense of and construct events – as crises or otherwise.
To summarise, supplementing constructivism with eventful sociology enables a richer understanding change, capturing complex processes of transformation in a highly polarised and fragmented period, wherein multi-authored antagonistic narratives mitigate the potential for cohesive, shared storying. As such, eventful sociology emphasises a shift away from single actors towards an iterative concerto of storying actors, empowered by the democratising technologies of the contemporary era. In short, eventful sociology helps us move beyond single dominant narratives and single dominant actors – both vital moves today, and crucial to understanding the events of January 6th.
The context of the Capitol riots: Multiple voices and narratives amidst affective polarisation
Perhaps narrative projects – of presidents or anyone else – are today doomed to failure, as countless narratives vie for the public’s attention, approbation and assent. Perhaps no narrative can dominate national debate as the Cold War consensus once did.Footnote 70
Affective polarisation is a defining feature of contemporary politics, particularly in the United States,Footnote 71 but is not a new condition. In this short section, three arguments are developed to set the broader context of January 6th: affective polarisation has increased steadily since the end of the Cold War; accompanied by a relative decline in the power of the president’s bully pulpit due, in part, to the dispersal of the power to story; resulting in a securitised bifurcation, sustained by multiple, interacting actors.
First, then, while the current era often feels exceptional, the conditions for both the division of affective polarisation, and the multiplicity of storying agents within it, both pre-date and extend beyond the rise of Trump. Iyengar et al. show how, from 1989, affective polarisation has steadily risen, driven primarily by a concomitant and enduring decline in out-party feeling.Footnote 72 While we will return to the implications of this, it has been driven, in part, by the unipolarity of the 1990s, which saw a decrease in the rallying effect of opposition to the Soviet Union (as existential foe), enabling a greater turn inwards. This geopolitical shift was exacerbated by the polling proclivities of key political figures, enabled by improved (granular) technology, and the rise of twenty-four-hour news coverage.Footnote 73 These trends accelerated on both sides of the millennium, with the connectivity of the internet, the rollout of social media, and the ubiquity of smartphones.
Second, in addition to the division of affective polarisation, this era has witnessed the elevation of multiple storying agents at the partial expense of the primacy of the president to narrate events for the populace. Increasingly, both sides of the aisle – locked in mutual antagonism – reproduce symbiotic duelling narratives through a range of key interlocuters. Krebs has articulated the bases of this division with some aplomb: ‘In the internet age, the public sphere is not a well-ordered agora, but a chaotic marketplace’; the challenge today, he argues, ‘is to be heard’.Footnote 74 Krebs notes the decline of the ‘well-ordered public sphere’ and the ‘cacophonous assembly’ of social media, as well as its potential impact on the very possibility of a dominant narrative of national security:Footnote 75 ‘audiences have become so fractured that the very idea of a dominant national security narrative strikes some as illusory, if not farcical’.Footnote 76 And, moreover, audiences are no longer passive sites of resonance (if they ever were). The mainstream and social media landscape has given a range of actors a platform to be heard (including within echo chambers).Footnote 77 This marries, tragically, to affective polarisation within which it is not a stronger affinity to like-minded citizens that has driven the recent intensification of US division; rather, it is ‘intense dislike (even hatred) of opponents’.Footnote 78 Today, this hatred has many authors.
Third, while the roots of affective polarisation pre-date Trump and rely upon technological advancement and geopolitical circumstance, it is crucial to recognise the impact of Trumpism within the divergence of US politics and its multi-author storying. The ‘contested’ and ‘rapidly changing communications environment’ from 2016 – with Trump at its heart – has clearly furthered the restructuring of American national security debate.Footnote 79 Indeed, the context for the events of January 6th was the polarisation of American politics that reflected, underpinned, and was exacerbated by Trump’s presidency and first, successful, run for the House. With the United States now more polarised than at any point since the Civil War, this is an area of research that has received significant and sustained attention.Footnote 80 It is a mutually antagonist loathing that Trump’s presidency, and responses to it, helped to ferment, as the usual referent objects of US national security discourse were turned away from an external enemy to instead be found within the American polis. This focus on ‘the enemy within’ will be familiar to many readers and has received sustained attention across studies unpacking Trump’s particular discursive style and recurrent narrative tropes.Footnote 81 As Löfflmann has shown, Trump’s populist security narrative – replete with familiar refrains to ‘drain the swamp’ of hostile liberal elites – centred and thrived upon a politics of antagonism.Footnote 82
Further still, Ben Fermor and Jack Holland have argued that Trump’s presidency was remarkable for the degree to which domestic politics became structured and divided by mutually sustaining, antagonistic securitisations – symbiotic existentialisms.Footnote 83 It is these tandem securitising moves that underpin two competing national security narratives. These twin narratives mirror and respond to each other, holding US citizens together not as united Americans but through juxtaposed relational alterity, which narrates the other side of the aisle as far more than just a political opponent and rather a wholesale threat to the country itself. We suggest that this is unique in the contemporary era due to the significant and sustained nature of these competing national security narratives, which enjoy enduring mutually reinforcing support. On one side, the Trump administration conflated the supposed threat posed by immigrants (as rapists, criminals, and terrorists) with his political enemies on the left, in particular young, minority women. Within this securitising move, the United States was imagined and constructed along ethno-nationalist lines, embodied in the ideal type of the revered white working-class voter, under existential threat from racialised progressives, who served the interests of America’s enemies rather than Trump’s ‘real America’.Footnote 84 On the other side, these same progressives – themselves diverse and divided – led in the construction of the Trump government as a threat to the United States, imagined and constructed through the lens of civic nationalism.Footnote 85 In this securitising move, Trump posed a fundamental threat to the cherished freedoms that founded and sustain life in the United States.Footnote 86
For Krebs, ‘despite the pressures toward fragmentation, the human need for ontological security, and thus the public demand for narrative order’ should ‘remain intact’.Footnote 87 Moreover, the ‘rise of the rest’ and risk of US decline should increase the demand for narrative coherence from America’s leaders;Footnote 88 stories should help to ease anxiety in the quest for ontological security, especially ‘if the shape of global order is uncertain’.Footnote 89 In short, ‘public demand for a simplifying narrative to cut through the complexity of global politics is as intense as ever’;Footnote 90 therefore, ‘as long as there are political communities, there will be dominant narratives’.Footnote 91 And yet, Iran, Russia, and China, for example, elicit diverging narratives in an era of sustained affective polarisation, as Iran is conflated with Obama, Russia rapidly transfers from enemy to ally (in the mutual battle against the Democrats), and China fluctuates between competitor and threat. In lieu of geopolitics’ unifying promise, Americans find national purpose in opposition to each other, such that domestic politics becomes national security. January 6th stands out as the example par excellence here, although there are innumerable others (BLM, riots, Me Too, etc.). Today, Trumpism and its attendant narrative of national security has endured, locked in relational antagonism with the Democrats’ national security storyline. In this now prolonged era of US politics and national security, there are two narratives of national security, not one, with both constructing a domestic Other, posing existential threat to US national security. These narratives have many authors, as the president’s hold on the national storyline has waned. This presents important implications for constructivist theory, with a need to develop a configurational (and sociological) counterweight to IR’s structuralism.
Methods
Dataset construction
To understand the construction – and complex, multi-author configuration – of the Capitol riots, we compiled for analysis a dataset comprising 1288 political and media texts, from liberal and conservative elites and outlets, in the period from 1 January 2020 to 15 May 2022 (due to scale, full details, longer quotations, and references for primary data are included in a detailed appendix). We used Lexis Nexis, ProQuest, UCSB presidential archives, and other key websites (e.g., WhiteHouse.gov) to import texts into NVivo for coding. Texts were selected for inclusion based on five guiding principles:
(i) Timeframe: Data was selected for four time windows (see text frequencies and disaggregation in notes, as well as appendix 2): election campaigns (1 January 2020–3 November 2020);Footnote 92 transition and riots (3 November 2020–20 January 2021);Footnote 93 new administration (20 January 2021–20 March 2021);Footnote 94 post-riots (2 November 2021–15 May 2022).Footnote 95 These time windows were selected in order to capture: the national security narratives of both parties and figureheads, the impact of the Capitol riots, the immediate response to the Capitol riots, and the subsequent narrative terrain of US governance after the riots.
(ii) Keywords: When included in headline (or headline and lead paragraphs in the case of low returns). Keywords were specific to each time window, e.g., Biden AND security.
(iii) Orator/source: following Lene Hansen’s model 2,Footnote 96 we included official speeches, opposition speeches and debates, and media commentary. We included key texts from:
a) Biden and key Democrats: principal speeches from leading figures; Democratic debates; election debates; Congressional and Senate records; speeches from appointed officials (e.g., new appointments, such as secretary of state).
b) Trump administration officials and the broader GOP: president (election rallies and key speeches); key figures in the administration (e.g., vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, press secretary); prominent Republicans in Congress and Senate (e.g., McConnell, Boebert, Romney, Taylor Greene, L. Cheney).
c) The media: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN (TV), and Fox News (TV), i.e., prominent liberal and conservative press and television coverage.
(iv) Relevance: Data cleaning was necessary. We manually removed duplicates and irrelevant results by topic.
(v) Sampling: To narrow the dataset and make coding manageable, random sampling was utilised across the four distinct time periods chosen for analysis: with every fifth (print sources) and every tenth (television sources) text selected.Footnote 97 The difference in the randomised sampling between print (every fifth) and television (every tenth) was due to the size of the television sources.Footnote 98 Following random sampling, we were left with a total of 1288 texts.
Approach to analysis
We employed a sequential three-part methodology to guide our qualitative data analysis of political elite and media texts across a twenty-nine-month period. Content, discourse, and narrative analysis were conducted in turn, following data collection and coding (see appendix). This tripartite approach enabled our analysis to move from the thematic, via broad structuring ideas and identities, to the storying of national security.
First, content analysis allowed us to ‘reveal constellations and frequency of code’.Footnote 99 Data was imported into and coded in NVivo. Coding was conducted by a team of three coders, overseen by two postdoctoral research assistants (PDRAs) and the principal investigator (PI). Thematic abductive coding (see appendix) generated aggregated findings for synchronic and diachronic comparative analysis – between parties and outlets, and across time windows. Coders were instructed to code for ‘what is there’ rather than striving for deeper or critical readings. However, some interpretation was necessary, for example, for codes around masculinity. The codebook was developed by the PI and PDRAs abductively, with codes emerging both inductively from the texts in dialogue with our deductive knowledge of Trump, Biden, and US national security politics.Footnote 100 The codebook was developed by analysing circa 10 per cent of the dataset and comprised a hierarchical coding framework made up of nodes, organised into three levels (see appendix 3). Sentiment (e.g., positive) and emotion (e.g., fear) nodes complemented substantive nodes (e.g., Sanders). We performed frequent, manual inter-coder reliability checks to ensure parity between coders. This was done initially through the mutual coding of sample texts to establish a baseline. Subsequently, following independent coding, regular (weekly) randomised samples of coding were distributed to ensure continued parity. Discrepancies between coding distributions remained low for the sample sets; minor differences were accounted for primarily by different interpretations of more abstract and deductive codes. A reconciliation process was undertaken in order to account for these differences and, again, an agreed upon baseline was established. Concurrence did not drop below the 80th percentile and was usually above 90 per cent.
Second, these aggregated frequencies were subsequently unpacked through a critical discourse analysis,Footnote 101 elucidating key structuring ideas and identities, in relation to partisan and political structures of power. Our abductive approach enabled us to place framings in their political (power) context, drawing on extant expertise and knowledge of US political discourse – for example, centred on tropes of exceptionalism or Jacksonianism – while remaining alive to inductively uncovered novel framings.
Third, we employed a narrative analysis to explore the storying of US national security. Our flexible, dual approach to narratology enabled us to explore both strategic uses of narrativeFootnote 102 and structural narrative power – assessing how stories shape political possibility.Footnote 103 Our focus on narrative emphasised identity and character construction (including but beyond Self and Other, e.g., the protagonist or deuteragonist, etc.), selectivity (and omission, i.e., what is and is not said), emplotment (e.g., character connections and environmental disequilibrium), and temporality (the story arc, such as the journey of the protagonist and imagined narrative closure of the final scene). As such, a narrative approach enabled us to explore relations between ideas and identities uncovered in the discourse analysis, including how these are plotted to evolve chronologically.
In all three stages – content, discourse, and narrative analysis – we explored the changes and continuities evident through a structured synchronic and diachronic comparison. This was done, first, ‘spatially’, that is, across the partisan political landscape (for conservatives and liberals, and for political and media elites) and, second, temporally, across the four time windows. Our eventful sociological focus centred on the framing, populating, and storying of the Capitol riots – the writing of the day’s meaning – as either a challenge to and departure from extant narrative frameworks, or as serving to reinforce, confirm, and reproduce them.
Analysing the construction of the Capitol riots
Our analysis reveals that: (i) the Capitol riots were ultimately constructed and configured as a confirmatory event by a majority of conservative and liberal actors; and (ii) to understand this construction of continuity, it is necessary to conceptualise US national security as structured by and through the relational interplay of two multi-authored, concurrent, co-constitutive, and coequal national security narratives. The implications of this finding are that (iii) constructivism requires supplementing to rise to the demands of the contemporary US era, as well as the increased complexities of variegated security contexts, as multiple storying actors interact to configure events.
We structure our analysis in two parts. First, Democrats and liberal media outlets constructed a narrative of the event with recourse to a trope of domestic terrorism. However, this was framed as continuity, with the Capitol riots confirming what we already knew. In part, this volitional choice came down to timing. Having won the election and seeking a secure basis on which to begin effective governance, it was deemed better to confirm what we already knew to be true and move on, that is, Trump threatens US democracy but now – with him ousted – is a moment for unity, not division. Within this framing, the Capitol riots were not a transformational event but instead sit within the expectations of a now-ended Trump era. Second, despite initial condemnations of the failed coup, the Republican party’s platform remained remarkably consistent, highlighting that the real ‘riots’ occurred in places such as Minneapolis, Portland, and Philadelphia. After some initial criticism was voiced, Republicans largely opted for silence. This silence was strategic and productive: an instrumental rhetorical mode that downplayed the seriousness and potential consequence of the event. Right-leaning news outlets demonstrated a slightly more nuanced response, opening a potential site of narrative and discursive change that went beyond more ephemeral rhetorical platitudes. However, again, we show that where nuances existed, with the potential for fractures in Republican discourse, they were quickly sealed over. For example, reversing initial hesitancy in Fox News’ early, partial condemnation of Trump constituted a self-interested volte-face. Our analysis highlights the importance of these nuances for multiple, interacting storying agents, located within and between two sustained security narratives in an era of affective polarisation.
Democratic constructions of continuity – what we ‘have long known’ and ‘could see coming’
Political elites
[w]hat we witnessed yesterday was not dissent. It was not disorder. It was not protest. It was chaos. They weren’t protesters. Don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It’s that basic. It’s that simple. And I wish we could say we couldn’t see it coming, but that isn’t true. We could see it coming.Footnote 104
On the campaign trail, Biden insisted that ‘[w]e have no need for armed militias roaming America’s streets, and we should have no tolerance for extremist white supremacy groups, menacing our communities’.Footnote 105 Immediately after January 6th, the president-elect took to the airwaves to contextualise the storming of Congress. For Biden and the Democratic party, the Capitol riots were certainly a significant event but one that had been foreseen and forewarned, within their dominant national security narrative.Footnote 106 Read thus, the Capitol riots were further proof of an imminent threat posed by – and an inevitable byproduct of – Trump’s divisive rhetoric.Footnote 107 Consequently, despite the apparently unprecedented nature of the day, within this narrative logic, it was constituted as a ‘focus event’, confirming the Democrats’ presuppositions. The emergence of the riots as a ‘focus event’, as opposed to a ‘shock event’, is significant as it mitigates the potential for significant discursive reformulation. Unlike shock events (such as 9/11), which challenge dominant national security narratives – and Americans’ conceptions of their place in the world and inherent domestic security – the Capitol riots served to reaffirm what Democrats knew all along: white supremacists, fuelled by Donald Trump’s political rhetoric, were an existential security threat. As Jen Psaki argued, the events ‘underscored what we have long known: The rise of domestic violent extremism is a serious and growing national security threat.’Footnote 108 But Democrats and President-Elect Biden could ‘see it coming’.Footnote 109
Although the Capitol riots would ultimately crystallise as a ‘focus event’ for the Democrats, this did not negate the opportunity the day presented to capitalise on a momentarily unsettled narrative situation. For Krebs,Footnote 110 in such uncertain moments, political actors should employ a storytelling mode to provide the narrative consistency a population desires. Correspondingly, there were limited Democratic attempts to construct an overarching narrative linking America’s history with racism, and those that sought to combat it, highlighting the need for the Justice Department to ‘stand up to the Klan, to stand up to racism, to take on domestic terrorism. This original spirit must again guide and animate its work.’Footnote 111
These rhetorical overtures were, however, relatively infrequent with an argumentation mode dominating the Democratic response. This facts-based approach was stark in its lack of attempt to re-write the Democrat’s preferred narrative: ‘The Biden administration will confront this threat with the necessary resources and resolve. We are committed to developing policies and strategies based on facts, on objective and rigorous analysis.’Footnote 112 For Krebs, this presents a ‘mismatched’ situation, where moment and mode inadequately combine. Opting for argumentation within an unsettled narrative situation yields the possibility – and perhaps necessity – of crafting a new dominant narrative. With arguments lacking the temporal logic, longitudinal coherency, and future reassurance of stories, the narrative landscape risks becoming further fractured, as every argument meets counter-argument. This is especially the case in the post-truth, ‘fake news’ era ushered in by the Trump administration. In sum, therefore, the Democratic response consistently reproduced the extant narrative that located white supremacy as a pre-eminent national security threat – as domestic terrorism. January 6th was incorporated within it as a focus event.
Two logics underpinned the decision to adopt an argumentation mode over a narrative one. First, as president-elect, Biden actively sought to shift from the narrative storytelling of an election campaign to the unity demanded at the outset of a new presidency. Our analysis revealed the centrality of ‘unity’ as a recurrent theme of Biden’s response.Footnote 113 Second, Biden and the Democratic party were attempting to distance themselves from – and juxtapose themselves to – the highly emotive and conspiracy theory-laden rhetoric of Trump’s presidency. One way this was achieved was through repeated emphasis that Democrats’ facts-based approach contrasted with their opponent’s ‘political lens’.Footnote 114 The implication was that, with Biden’s election, America had returned to calm, considered, and grown-up governance. Within Krebs’s framework, this framing constitutes a failure to capitalise on an unsettled narrative situation.Footnote 115 However, this was more than agency–narrative ‘fit’, or its lack; it was, rather, developed by design, involving multiple, relational storying agents. Democrats constructed January 6th as continuity, in significant part, due to desire to maximise distance from Donald Trump and commence governing.Footnote 116 The emotional storytelling of the past four years was deliberately avoided and contrasted.
Media
Like the Democratic Party, liberal news outlets – such as the New York Times and CNN – framed January 6th as a focus event: the almost inevitable outcome of a pattern of violent and inflammatory rhetoric. Again, liberal commentators doubled down on an extant narrative, covering the riots through ‘facts’. This located January 6th as another chapter – rather than the opening chapter – of a particular and troubling narrative. For example: ‘[f]or four years, he played to the crowd, stirring anger, whipping up us-against-them conflicts and at times encouraging violence… All of which played out in the months that led to the election on Nov. 3 and the Capitol siege on Jan. 6.’Footnote 117 This led, naturally, to the requirement ‘to denounce President Donald Trump’s role in the violent insurrection attempt on the US Capitol on Wednesday’, just as the United States routinely denounces ‘foreign leaders who use violence and intimidation to interfere in peaceful democratic processes and override the will of their voters’.Footnote 118
Despite important variation, liberal media coverage coalesced around the framing of a ‘focus event’, as an insurrection: an attempt to overthrow the government, emphasising the culpability of Trump within this process.Footnote 119 The New York Times, for example, emulated and amplified the language of the Democratic Party to highlight that ‘American democracy is under siege’ and ‘[t]he riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was the direct result of a campaign by former President Donald J. Trump to undermine American democracy and overthrow the election at any cost’.Footnote 120 Indeed, the New York Times’ five most coded themes included ‘insurrection’, ‘Trump as security threat’, and ‘American democracy under threat’. The other two – ‘division’ and ‘fraudulent election’ – help to explain Biden’s efforts towards unity and fact-based analysis. Likewise, CNN’s five most coded nodes included ‘fraudulent election’, ‘insurrection’, and ‘impeachment’, which placed January 6th within a long-running story of deceit, political violence, and consequence. Their focus was on the impending impeachment of Donald Trump for his role in the riots: Trump was ‘intentionally inciting rioters with a month’s long campaign saying that he whipped up his supporters into a quote, “frenzy” and aimed them like a loaded cannon down Pennsylvania Avenue’.Footnote 121 This extended to the claim that Trump threatened US democracy and was, himself, an existential security threat: ‘That’s a president who is attacking not just democracy but our national security.’Footnote 122
Despite slightly differing temporal foci, the tone of coverage was similar for both outlets; in particular, with a focus on the contrasting and preferable treatment of the January 6th rioters in comparison to BLM protestors. For example: ‘The comparatively lenient response to the overwhelmingly white protesters on Wednesday…was the epitome of white supremacy…and a dangerous precedent for the future of protest in the United States.’Footnote 123 Additionally, the New York Times worked to establish blame, levying this charge not only against Trump: ‘Most Americans say the former president bears responsibility for the Capitol attack by his supporters, but…Democrats say a considerable number of their Republican colleagues …are accomplices to the president in inciting the attack on the Capitol.’Footnote 124 Given that negative portrayals of Trump remained relatively consistent in the liberal news media, this broadening of guilt was significant; as Ratcliffe has argued, outlets such as ‘MSNBC and the NYT remained consistent in their framing of Trump, but with an across the board increase in the salience of negative frames’.Footnote 125 What changed was ‘the NYT’s use of the threat to democracy frame’, which ‘quadrupled’.Footnote 126 The upshot was that January 6th was framed as proof of an extant national security narrative – and the need to characterise the broader GOP as guilty – not as evidence of the need to write a new story. If the ‘focus event’ were to have a broader impact, it would be Trump’s supporters finally accepting the long-established liberal national security narrative: ‘If the president is surprised somehow that people would turn after he incited an attack on his own government, maybe he should spend some time in Mar-a-Lago thinking about that.’Footnote 127 This, however, was tempered by the realisation that two national security narratives structure American politics: ‘some folks that I have spoken to here today say they no longer watch FOX News because FOX News called the election for Biden’.Footnote 128
Republican constructions of continuity – normalisation, deflection, theatre
Political elites
Like the liberal left, conservative elites and media largely doubled down on extant narratives of national security, albeit with greater initial hesitancy and momentary nuance. In contrast to Democrats’ framing of the Capitol riots as confirmatory of the threat posed by Trump specifically and the GOP generally, Republicans instead highlighted the threat posed to democracy and the United States by foreign actors, BLM, and Antifa protests. This securitisation of (largely minority) liberal activists was extended before, during, and after the election and subsequent Capitol riots to include all Democrats, who were presented as the gravest threat to American democracy.Footnote 129 Here, we unpack these framings prior to and following January 6th.
In the run-up to the Capitol riots, conservative politicians and media were reinforcing a pre-established national security narrative, which can be understood through two related Othering moves. First, Republican political elites emphasised the threat posed by foreign actors. These included a fixation on China and illegal immigration.Footnote 130 Second, this threat was extended to Democrats, who were framed as acting against the US national interest and security.Footnote 131 For example, Trump lamented that Biden’s lifting of the Muslim travel ban opened ‘the flood gates to radical Islamic terrorism’ and warned that ‘[i]f they win, Democrats will pack the Supreme Court with radical left justices who will shred your Second Amendment’.Footnote 132 Trump’s and the broader GOP language at this time was fixated on BLM and Antifa protests, positioning both as domestic terrorism, for which Biden was to blame:
for the entire summer, Biden was silent as far left rioters viciously attacked law enforcement in Democrat run cities all, burned down businesses, terrorized civilians, and just recently marched through the streets chanting, ‘Death to America.’ This is what we have. Death to America. … Biden’s plan is to appease the domestic terrorist.Footnote 133
Between the election and riots, the conservative national security narrative reached its apogee, in the claim of a fraudulent result – a stolen election – and the imperative to reverse it: ‘[t]he Democrats are trying to steal the White House. You cannot let them. You just can’t let them steal the U.S. Senate. You can’t let it happen. You can’t let it happen.’Footnote 134 These efforts culminated in Trump’s infamous ‘Save America’ rally wherein he proclaimed ‘[w]e’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s Capitol for one very, very basic and simple reason, to save our democracy’.Footnote 135 He insisted that ‘[w]e fight like Hell and if you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore’, before urging supporters to follow him: ‘we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue…and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give…them [the weak Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country’.Footnote 136 Trump’s supporters did indeed walk down Pennsylvania Avenue and attempt to ‘save their democracy’ from the senators who were about to vote to confirm the election results.
The immediate response to the Capitol riots was quick and severe, with near unanimous condemnation of both the rioters and Trump’s involvement in rousing their movement. In these early stages, there were hints that, for some Republicans, the day constituted a ‘shock event’, insofar that it was a ‘significant rejection…of the ideas and expectations that comprise existing interpretative structures’.Footnote 137 The riots challenged a long-held conservative narrative that depicts Republicans as the political party of law and order as well as directly contradicting attempts to demonise and ‘Other’ participants in the summer’s civil unrest (e.g., BLM). Given this challenge to dominant ‘interpretative structures’ within conservative discourse, the potential for narrative change was significant, with early indicators that it might be realised. During the election campaign, prominent Republican politicians consistently failed or declined to question or condemn Trump’s increasingly volatile and inflammatory rhetoric; the January 6th riots, however, would serve as a watershed moment for some.Footnote 138 Within hours, statements of condemnation poured out from Republican senators:
We just had a violent mob assault the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent those from carrying out our Constitutional duty. There is no question that the President formed the mob, the President incited the mob, the President addressed the mob. He lit the flame. This is what America is not. It has just been absolutely intolerable and unacceptable.Footnote 139
The shock and near unanimous denunciation of these events in their immediate aftermath even forced a seemingly reluctant Trump to speak out against the actions. First, this took the form of asking rioters to stand down: ‘We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order.’Footnote 140 Second, the following day, there was even condemnation of the attacks, with Trump stating he was ‘outraged’ by the ‘heinous’ ‘violence’ and ‘lawlessness’.Footnote 141 At this early stage, with emergent, fragmented condemnation beginning to cohere within the Republican party, the foundations were set for efforts towards the establishment of a new dominant narrative, on the back of the Capitol riots being experienced and narrated as a ‘shock event’, initiating an unsettled narrative situation amidst a public yearning for understanding.Footnote 142
Despite this potential, initial condemnations quickly receded into a deafening silence, which, while not uniform, was extensive.Footnote 143 Trump distanced himself from the riots while simultaneously reaffirming that Democrats posed the pre-eminent threat to American security:Footnote 144 ‘the horrible riots in Portland and Seattle and various other places. That was a real problem.’Footnote 145 Likewise, foreign enemies were emphasised and ‘big tech’ targeted,Footnote 146 following Trump’s deplatforming on social media.Footnote 147 And, with greater distance to the day, Republican language became more mocking of Democratic security concerns:
The US Capitol has giant fences with razor wires and 5,000 National Guard standing out front because the Democrats are convinced that political theater helps them. Let’s be clear, this is not about security at this point. This is about political theater.Footnote 148
GOP Representative Andrew Clyde,Footnote 149 for example, went as far as to claim ‘there was no insurrection, to call it an insurrection, in my opinion, is a bald-faced lie’, despite photographs from the day showing him barricading the doors to Congress to prevent the ‘normal tourist visit’ from getting any further into the building.
Media
In the leadup to the riots, Fox News, in particular,Footnote 150 maintained a steady stream of guests who corroborated Trump’s narrative of election fraud.Footnote 151 The two synergistic narratives of US national security structured political debate through both the main political parties and ‘legacy media’. This partisanship largely but incompletely held, following the Capitol riots, as conservative media demonstrated a similar momentary hesitation following the events, before broadly (if differently) lining up behind Trump and the Republican’s long-established narrative. After some introspection, conservative media pivoted towards representations diminishing the severity of the event itself while also highlighting that it was analogous to similar political unrest carried out by left-wing ‘rioters’ in the wake of George Floyd’s killing.
Media coverage on Fox and in the Wall Street Journal coalesced around several key trends that worked to diminish responsibility and distance the Republican party from the Capitol riots. For Fox News, thematic coverage centred around five key framings: ‘Riot as [an ordinary] crime’/‘Riot response too severe’, ‘impeachment’, ‘Democrats as the problem’, ‘Trump as a security threat’, and ‘comparisons of right- and left-wing protesters’.Footnote 152 Fox News’ most prominently coded theme sought to emphasise that the response to the riots was far too severe.Footnote 153 This enabled differentiation of responsibility and a coherence with initial condemnation of rioters, in contrast to wrongly persecuted protestors: ‘There doesn’t seem to be a lot of effort to differentiate between the peaceful protesters and those who were actually rioting.’Footnote 154 Discussions of disproportionate crackdowns and government (and big tech) overreach served to diminish the severity of the riot and shift the focus away from those responsible: ‘Bank of America is, without the knowledge or the consent of its customers, sharing private information with Federal law enforcement agencies. Bank of America effectively is acting as an Intelligence Agency.’Footnote 155
One specific feature of Fox’s coverage was the move to render January 6th as ‘ordinary’ – a banal and mundane crime, rather than something exceptional. This enabled the Capitol riots’ integration into an extant narrative, rather than constructing an event demanding of original storying. In contrast to liberal efforts to label events as an insurrection and failed coup, Fox sought to diminish the day’s significance through its normalisation as an ordinary crime, with representations emphasising the mundane: ‘they committed a serious crime that should be prosecuted under law’.Footnote 156 This framing dilutes the initial shock that accompanied unprecedented imagery, to instead focus on the processual and bureaucratic elements of the response.
A second important feature of Fox’s coverage was the effort to deflect attention to the liberal left. First, this was achieved by highlighting that the left is the real cause of American political discord:
make no mistake: the left in America has incited far more political violence than the right. Some have cited the metaphor that the president lit the flame. Well, they lit actual flames, actual fires.Footnote 157
Second, this was achieved through recurrent comparisons of past left-wing civil unrest when discussing the Capitol riots:
22 year-old Harrisburg, Pennsylvania woman is now officially accused of stealing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s laptop during the Capitol riot. A superseding indictment against Riley Williams includes new charges of theft of government property and obstruction. Both felonies carry potential sentences of up to 20 years in prison. An anti-racism protest organizer in California is facing serious charges tonight. Tatiana Turner is accused of trying to run down counter-protesters after her gatherings were declared unlawful assemblies. She’s also accused of beating two people with a metal rod and deploying pepper spray.Footnote 158
Third, Fox sought to ridicule futile efforts towards impeachment as Democratic political ‘theatre’: ‘impeachment is dead on arrival. It’ll just now be all theater’:Footnote 159
If the president can be impeached and convicted for encouraging his supporters that day, many of you will peacefully, patriotically march to the capitol, to make your voices heard… If that’s the standard, we got a hell of a lot of impeachment days ahead of us, a lot of trials ahead.Footnote 160
Together, the message was simple and enduring: Democrats were not only to blame, but they were also existentially threatening and illegitimately persecuting Trump and his supporters.
Prominent pundits, such as Tucker Carlson, were explicit in acknowledging that the Capitol riots had the potential to usher in a powerful new narrative of US national security, while noting that they should not. For Carlson, Fox, and conservative media, the twin, synergistic narratives of US national security should hold:
White nationalist insurrection. Again, it was awful, it was not that. But you’ve got to ask yourself, why are they claiming that it was that? … it was a failed revolution… We need a new war against our own population and not surprisingly, that’s exactly what they are calling for.Footnote 161
And this effort to preserve the status quo was replicated in the more moderate and less heavily editorialised Wall Street Journal:
the country is being torn apart by hyper-partisan politics, by the invasion of the Capitol last week, by the summer’s urban riots, and by the second impeachment of President Trump.Footnote 162
Similarly:
The president’s claims of a stolen election are dubious, but they’re nothing worse than what Democrats and the media did for four years in promoting the false Russia-collusion story, refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Trump presidency, and trying to destroy it.Footnote 163
After all, ‘[t]he left’s strategy is to stoke GOP division, to keep it in the headlines, and to hobble the party’s efforts to block radical Democratic policies’.Footnote 164
In combination and summary, the outcome of America’s deeply polarised politics is that two national security narratives structured the country’s response to the Capitol riots (see Figure 1). Both Democrats and Republicans constructed a focus event within very different, twinned national security narratives. Both narratives encouraged continuity, albeit along very different (if entwined) narrative paths. These constructions were configured, with multiple storying agents (beyond the president) acting in relational, iteratively interactive ways.
Conservative and liberal constructions of the Capitol riots: A focus event encouraging continuity within the securitised polarisation of America’s twinned national security narratives.
Conclusion
If as a nation we are split into warring camps, if we teach our citizens not to look upon one another as brothers but as enemies divided…surely we shall fail and our great democratic experiment on this continent will go down in crushing overthrow.Footnote 165
Combining constructivist insights on language with interdisciplinary work on eventful sociology, we have shown – empirically – how the Capitol riots were configured in US political debate as a confirmatory (rather than rupturing) event for the two distinct and synergistic national security narratives that now structure US politics. This is, perhaps, surprising. An alternative was possible, led by either or both of the two main political parties. This was reflected in initial Republican and conservative hesitation, before, slowly, and in iterative dialogue, a range of voices worked to write the day in ways that downplayed its significance. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Democrats did too, as they attempted to set out, instead, a unified platform on which to commence government. Given Trump’s re-ascendence to the presidency, it could feasibly be suggested that this was a mistake, amounting to the passing up of an opportunity to construct a more profound crisis moment with attendant identities for key figures that would be harder from which to bounce back.
Division within the hyper-partisan US political landscape is deeply entrenched. Yet, within and between these distinct political communities, multiple storying actors interact to configure events. We have shown how a configurational constructivism, drawing on eventful sociology, can better help us to make sense of this new – divided and fragmented information – era; emphasising that a constellation of fragmented storying actors, often working to opposing ends, work to configure narratives on national security, modifying the presupposed power of America’s foremost political elites (e.g., the bully pulpit) and limiting the chances for dominant narratives to emerge.
This article sets out a research agenda for the greater uptake of eventful sociology in IR. Within that uptake there is considerable scope for the assessment of whether it amounts to a supplementation or more wholesale correction. Does eventful sociology replace, modify, or condition the more structural impulses of constructivism? Is a configurational constructivism commensurate with Krebs’s reliance on fit to explore transitions between settled and unsettled narrative situations? We would also point to the importance of narrative’s temporality in such considerations, not least in the rich vein of ontological security theorising.Footnote 166 The contemporary moment has foregrounded nationalist populist invocations of nostalgia and past certainties, as well as the importance of future imaginaries. Competing temporalities – including the writing of events such as January 6th – are central to today’s divided, fractured, and multi-authored politics.
Finally, while the ‘new normal’ of affective polarisation – in which domestic politics is securitised – looks relatively unfamiliar to scholars of contemporary IR and US politics, it is far more familiar to historians of the US Civil War. Theoretical renewal and comparative historical enquiry, we suggest, can shed light on today’s polarised national security politics and, potentially, an increasingly complex world politics. Constructivism’s principal focus on single dominant national security narratives, with single dominant orators, should be updated in line with the new empirical reality.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2026.10064.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the Centre for Global Security Challenges at the University of Leeds. We would like to thank our coding team – Emily Faux (now Connor), Emma Brewis, and Laura McQuade, as well as Ben Fermor – alongside Charlotte Ratcliffe for sharing her own research on the Capitol riots. Earlier versions of this paper benefited greatly from feedback at the BISA US Foreign Policy Working Group, BISA annual conference, and EISA PEC. We would also like to thank the editorial team at EJIS, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions.
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